Pop flies, in a sense, are just a diversion for a second baseman. Grounders are his stock in trade.
Jackie Robinson

At the beginning of the World Series of 1947, I experienced a completely new emotion when the National Anthem was played. This time, I thought, it is being played for me, as much as for anyone else.
Jackie Robinson

Yes, here is my homeground here and in all the Negro communities through the land. Here I stand.
Jackie Robinson

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me and I had done much for it.
Jackie Robinson

I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.
Jackie Robinson

We ask for nothing special. We ask only to be permitted to live as you live, and as our nation’s constitution provides.
Jackie Robinson

How much more effective our demands for a piece of the action would be if we were negotiating from the strength or our own self-reliance rather than stating our case in the role of beggar or someone crying out for charity.
Jackie Robinson

Next time I go to a movie and see a picture of a little ordinary girl become a great star… I’ll believe it. And whenever I hear my wife read fairy tales to my little boy, I’ll listen. I know now that dreams do come true.
Jackie Robinson

We live in a materialistic society in which money doesn’t talk—it screams.
Jackie Robinson

[On getting other boys to give him sandwiches and dimes for the movies so they could play on his baseball team] I told my mother she could save food by not fixing a lunch for me.
Jackie Robinson

Mr Rickey, do you want a ballplayer who’s afraid to fight back? [‘I want a player with guts enough not to fight back’ – Rickey]
Jackie Robinson

[On becoming the first Negro baseball player] If you want to take this gamble, I will promise you there will be no incident.
Jackie Robinson

I remember even as a small boy, having a lot of pride in my mother. I thought she must have had some kid of magic to be able to do all the things she did, to work so hard and never complain and to make us all feel happy. We had our family squabbles and spats, but we were a well-knit unit.
Jackie Robinson

They decided that I was the best man to beat. I enjoyed having that kind of reputation, but I was also a very much aware of the importance of being a team man, not jeopardizing my team’s chances simply to get the spotlight.
Jackie Robinson

[On leaving university (UCLA) in 1941 even though he had not yet earned his degree. He was convinced that] No amount of education would help a black man get a job. I felt I was living in an academic and athletic dream world. It seemed very necessary for me to relieve some of my mother’s financial burdens even though I knew it had always been her dream to have me finish college.
Jackie Robinson

If I could choose one of the most important moments in my life, I would go back to 1947, in the Yankee Stadium in New York City. It was the opening day of the world series and I was for the first time playing in the series as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers team. It was a history-making day. It would be the first time that a black man would be allowed to participate in a world series. I had become the first black player in the major leagues.
Jackie Robinson

I was proud to be in the hurricane eye of a significant breakthrough and to be used to prove that a sport can’t be national if blacks are barred from it.
Jackie Robinson

Mr Rickey had shocked some of his fellow baseball tycoons and angered others by deciding to smash the unwritten law that kept blacks out of the big leagues. He had chosen me as the person to lead the way.
Jackie Robinson

It hadn’t been easy. Some of my own teammates refused to accept me because I was black. I had been forced to live with snubs and rebuffs and rejections.
Jackie Robinson

Some of the Dodgers who swore they would never play with a black man had a change of mind, when they realized I was a good ballplayer who could be helpful in their earning a few thousand more dollars in world series money.
Jackie Robinson

After the initial resistance to me had been crushed, my teammates started to give me tips on how to improve my game. They hadn’t changed because they liked me any better; the had changed because I could help fill their wallets.
Jackie Robinson

[On Branch Rickey] In a way I feel I was the son he had lost and he was the father I had lost.
Jackie Robinson

[On Mr Rickey’s decision] I learned that his family was afraid that his health was being undermined by the resulting pressures and that they pleaded with him to abandon the plan. His peers and fellow baseball moguls exerted all kinds of influence to get him to change his mind. Some of the press condemned him as a fool and a demagogue. But he didn’t give in…
Jackie Robinson

[On Negros needing a successful baseball player] Suppressed and repressed for so many years, they needed a victorious black man as a symbol. It would help them believe in themselves.
Jackie Robinson